Arnold Böcklin

1827 - 1901 • Swiss/German • Painter • Symbolist

"Your remark that an easel picture should not be treated like a decoration, but carried out as the expression of a definite practical mood, precisely reflects my view concerning this picture. ... Up to now I have kept the work carefully hidden, in order not to be led astray by premature comments. At a later stage, however, an expert opinion becomes indispensable, because the eye can grow accustomed even to mistakes." - Arnold Böcklin

Bocklin lived in Italy after mid-century, and the comments quoted above were written in Rome, in 1865, to a PATRON for whom he was painting a picture. Back in Basel, his birthplace, during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71,Bocklin contemplated human brutality as he heard and saw the fighting across the Swiss border. This he expressed in The Battle of the Centaurs, of which he painted different versions in 1872-73. As ancient Greeks had used conflict between those mythological half-human, half-horse creatures as metaphors for contemporary events, so too did Bocklin, who painted them throwing boulders and pulling hair. His centaurs struggle grotesquely on a perversely unGreek, snow-covered landscape. Centaurs is Bocklin's most renowned work, but he also painted strange, moody landscapes like Island of the Dead (1880, first version). Synthetic, as SYMBOLIST art intended, Island draws together elements from different landscapes in an imaginary, subjective picture of a haunting, lonely place. The title was assigned later; Bocklin himself called the work "a picture for dreaming over." Bocklin inspired a series of German followers, and later was much admired by SURREALISTS, de CHIRICO especially. In his later years Bocklin was preoccupied with designs for an airplane.